879: Lifting the veil on the cult of Aphrodite – Book Presentation : The Naked Truth 7/18/2016

Or:
Make Love and not War

By
Heidi Trautmann

The
subtitle ‘Make Love and not War’ I added when I heard the sad news about the coup
in Turkey and the butchery Erdogan’s supporters
carried through on young soldiers who knew nothing of what they were
actually doing except carrying out orders. I could not continue writing. Thus,
my comments on the new book are receiving a serious introduction about Love and
Hate, Death and Life, all so very close to each other and all so eternal since
the existence of the human beings. The publishing - and presentation of the
book on July 15, 2016 - a graphic novel,
actually the first erotic comic book, could not have been done at a more appropriate
time. Make Love not War!

Our
friend Christiane Sternberg who is the publisher of ‘Aphroditeschatten’ (meaning in the shadow of
Aphrodite); a German blog under the roof
of www.CIPS.COM.CY , is a
freelance journalist and lives in Cyprus, Aphrodite’s island full of
contradictions;

Christiane
seems to be very attracted to the goddess of love and on the basis of some
intensive research on the legends surrounding her, in cooperation with Eva
Selwood, she developed the idea of creating a novel, a graphic novel with the
help of the artist David Selwood, also living in Cyprus, the final act of
graphic layout was done by Marcos Gittis. The text was there but now it had to
be split up into small scene scripts and texts for speech bubbles. The creating
of hundreds of A4 well done drawings took David over two years. He said he used
water colour pencils and you can see that he has some practice in this kind of
work. Christiane told me how amazed she was to see what you can tell with one drawing.
Where a whole page was necessary for her to describe a scene, a single drawing
includes all of it without having to lose a single word. You can read the
artist’s CV – also other information - under the following link for English readers: http://aphroditenakedtruth.cips.com.cy/

The
story, permissive and lacking respect, is placed in the year 217 in Pafos, at
the annual event of the Aphrodisia days when people came flocking into town, others
descending from sailing boats and the streets were black with worshippers of
the goddess; all had come to honour her and to obey her rules of love. All
whorehouses had opened their doors and the temple and its priestesses were
expecting the masses, however, the story also includes one true love story.

No
need to beat about the bush, the ceremonies held in those ancient times were
very open in every sense; the gods and goddesses were indulging and sharing and
cultivating their passions and desires allowing their worshippers to do
likewise. Just think of all those stories around Zeus, the tricks he used to
seduce women he took a fancy in; immorality reigned in Olympos the seat of the
gods and goddesses, were they not just a reflection of the desires of people
living down below on earth?

The
Aphrodisia days lasted for several days, young girls were initiated and older
ones were just enjoying themselves. It made people too tired to think of war.

Christiane
said to me, people of today are too prudish or, let us be honest, hypocritical
... it is done just the same, though behind shutters, all that what you see in
this graphic novel, however, today we don’t have any similar Aphrodisia days.

The
book of 160 pages is published as two separate versions in English and German